Leonard Peltier knew his time was running out.
The 77-year-old Native American human rights activist has serious health problems, just escaped the ugly battle of COVID-19, and is now serving his 46th year in federal prison, where he was imprisoned by the United States government. United States. Without any evidence that he committed the crime.
Peltier and his supporters hope that President Joe Biden will eventually send him home. Because if something has become clear over time, it is How disturbing Peltier’s imprisonment is This is from the beginning. Prosecutors hid key evidence at his trial. The FBI threatened and forced witnesses to lie. The jury admitted he was biased against Native Americans on the second day of the trial, but still allowed him to remain.
Even some U.S. government officials who have facilitated Peltier’s detention since then acknowledged how inadequate his trial was and how disgusting the government’s treatment of Indians was, and asked for his forgiveness.
There is reason to believe that Biden will finally be able to give Peltier his freedom. It has already shown a willingness to address the past injustices of the Indians towards the Americans. Since taking office, Biden has made it a priority to study the ugly history of pensions in India, protect indigenous shrines and cultural resources, and address the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women. It also removed the Keystone XL pipeline, which was a significant achievement for tribes and conservationists.
Biden also elected Debbie Hollande to head the Interior Ministry, appointing her as secretary to the native country’s first cabinet. Netherlands Strongly supported Peltier’s release from prison In a previous role as Congressman.
In November, HuffPost forced Hollande to find out if he supported Peltier’s ouster of state secretary and if he had talked to the president. “My thoughts and feelings on this issue are well documented,” Hollande said.
Peltier who only had a few minutes alone with Biden. What will you say?
In an extraordinary interview in Florida from his maximum security prison, Peltier recently told HuffPost that his message would be easy for the president.
“I am not at fault for any wrongdoing. “I’m not at fault,” he said. “I want to go home to spend the remaining years with my grandchildren and my people.”
Peltier said he watches Biden’s efforts to support the strengthening of Native American rights and tribes, and if he had the president’s ear, he would have deserved it.
“I appreciate what you are doing to give us back our nationality, our sovereignty,” he told Biden. “I’m so grateful for it, because I’ve fought for it my whole life.”
Prior to his incarceration, Peltier was a member of the American Indian Movement, or AIM, a grassroots activist group dedicated to violating federal treaty rights, discrimination and police brutality against Native Americans. In the early 1970s, the FBI conducted a covert campaign to suppress AIM activities. In fact, as time has shown, the FBI was at least partially responsible for the shooting on the Pine Ridge Reservation that day, as it deliberately exacerbated internal tribal tensions there to disrupt AIM’s efforts.
Today, the FBI remains the biggest obstacle to Peltier’s release, for no other reason than because he wants to defend himself from past crimes. The Bureau just doesn’t want him to be released. Recently announced on HuffPost – Even if we haven’t been asked. This is very strange. The unsolicited statement he made was also full of misinformation, suggesting that the FBI’s plan continues to come up with an inappropriate and convincing argument to keep Peltier in prison until his death.
Peltier said he knew exactly what FBI Director Christopher Rey would say if he could talk to himself in a matter of minutes.
“Stop killing my people. “I’ll tell him all this,” she said. “Stop killing my people. “People who have committed crimes in the reserves will be arrested.”
Perhaps Pellet’s greatest strength is what the FBI can’t match: the ongoing strength of its story. Over the decades, thousands of pPeople protested his detention, including US senators, members of Congress, local American groups, celebrities and human rights leaders such as Pope Francis, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Coretta Scott King, and Amnesty International, an organization focused in a different way. to political prisoners. Other countries.
Last week, Senator Brian Shats (D-Hawaii), chairman of the Senate Affairs Committee on India, urged Attorney General Merrick Garland about Peltier’s pardon as Garland testified at a Senate budget hearing. . The U.S. Attorney General offered a surprisingly poor response, saying he didn’t know about Peltier’s case any more than he had read in the press.
The request for Peltier to be released is also being made around the world. On Tuesday, North Dakota State Congresswoman Ruth Anna Buffalo (D) issued a statement at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and apologized for her.
“Leonard Peltier’s case demonstrates the failure of the U.S. criminal justice system to provide true justice to the local population, as well as the racist environment created by the government, which continues to lead to unfair beliefs,” he said. by Buffalo. In his statement, Che read aloud on behalf of Leonard Peltier’s International Defense Committee. He asked the United Nations to help with “aid and justice for Leonard Peltier”.
Buffalo later told HuffPost that he believed his statements were “well received” at the UN forum.
“Hopefully reading the statement on behalf of the ILPDC will have a positive impact on the release of our leader, Leonard Peltier,” he said. “I’m grateful for Leonard Peltier’s defense of decades of fighting for justice.”
“I am not at fault. I want to go home to spend many years with my grandchildren and my people ”.
-Leonard Peltier
Peltier watches this game from a prison cell. He receives regular updates from fans on news about him and on rallies organized in his name. It’s incredibly up to date with current news. Sometimes people email him to read articles and when he can’t access relevant news on the internet, he has friends calling him and reading him on the phone, in a row.
In an interview with HuffPost, he spoke mainly. He said he recently feared the chest pain he sustained while walking the prison grounds and hoped to return to painting after years of being banned from entering an art room due to the scale of the pandemic.
Asked if he was thinking from prison to death, Peltier said he did not know. So far, the White House has ignored HuffPost’s questions about the president’s willingness to pardon Peltier, or I just discussed the process The person has to go through a request for forgiveness.
“Sometimes it feels good …” – said Peltier and followed him. “I shouldn’t be here either. ⁇ He shouldn’t have been confined in the beginning.
He is clearly still living up to the Native American cause of justice he fought for on AIM many years ago. She recounted in the 1970s when she said indigenous women regularly raped white men who were later punished with little or nothing for it, and she and other AIM members challenged local law enforcement to do something. about this.
Peltier specifically cited the case of former South Dakota Republican Governor Bill Janklow, who was allegedly raped by a 15-year-old Lakota student, Janchita Eagle Deer, at the Rosebud Boarding House on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. A kite was mysteriously killed in a car a few months after testifying against Janklow, who was never charged.
“Indigenous people are people and we have had a society, a very advanced society. We are generous people. Ჩ We gave. This is our problem, “he said.” When a white man first came here, we achieved a lot. This is what we did. We opened up because that’s how we grew up. For the past 300 years we have had nothing but violence. “
Peltier said he has a solid base of supporters who continue to fight for his pardon This shows that the more he learned about his incarceration, the more people “believed” that the whole process was unfair.
“How do I feel about it?” I am happy about this, ”said Roni Bar-On, Knesset member for Kadima. “Maybe I can go home and die now.”
He paused before adding:I still hate what they did. They did wrong to me. It violates the entire Constitution of the United States ”.
Source: Huffpost
